Post by paynebyname on Feb 27, 2008 12:57:02 GMT -5
What an adrenaline shot this film was and it reminded me how I felt after seeing Ong Bak and Warrior King.
Martial Arts film were becoming boring. PG rated, gravity ignoring, wired-worked, over CGI’d and almost clown like. You went to see a fighting film because you wanted to see fighting. Yet just as the genre was stagnating in its own pomposity, Tony Jaa came along with a brand of refreshing, invigorating martial artistry. Stuff that made you go ‘Wow’ rather than question whether two people could fight on a bamboo branch, scenes that made you think ‘Blimey, that’s gotta hurt’ and images that made you gasp in their ferocity.
Seeing people fight connects to a deep rooted bloodlust and there is no point in denying this, hence when in Warrior King the bad guys kill Tony’s elephant and then stab him you want to see angry, painful retribution. I haven’t come to see him sit down and discuss it over tea, I want violence. I want to see someone technically skilled smashing the sh*t out of a collection of bad guys.
Rambo was the same. Action films nowadays might have some ‘shaky cam’ to add realism and some big explosions but you want to action that shocks you, that gets your heart pounding, that isn’t the formulaic A-team esque ‘explosion to the left, explosion to the right’. You want something that makes you feel like how you felt after the beach scene in Saving Private Ryan. All action films are setting you up for the good guy prevailing over the bad guy but this takes it to the next level.
Whether I’m an imbalanced, psychotic troubled man I don’t know but I do know that I felt physically charged after this film. Not charged to go and hurt someone but feeling that my adrenaline was flowing. I felt alive. A piece of film, like Ong Bak etc, had got a physical reaction from me.
It’s set a new benchmark for conveying the real brutality of war and it will be interesting to see what action films have to do to ‘fire up’ their audience in the future. Either way I certainly think Sly has given it a welcome shot in the arm.
Martial Arts film were becoming boring. PG rated, gravity ignoring, wired-worked, over CGI’d and almost clown like. You went to see a fighting film because you wanted to see fighting. Yet just as the genre was stagnating in its own pomposity, Tony Jaa came along with a brand of refreshing, invigorating martial artistry. Stuff that made you go ‘Wow’ rather than question whether two people could fight on a bamboo branch, scenes that made you think ‘Blimey, that’s gotta hurt’ and images that made you gasp in their ferocity.
Seeing people fight connects to a deep rooted bloodlust and there is no point in denying this, hence when in Warrior King the bad guys kill Tony’s elephant and then stab him you want to see angry, painful retribution. I haven’t come to see him sit down and discuss it over tea, I want violence. I want to see someone technically skilled smashing the sh*t out of a collection of bad guys.
Rambo was the same. Action films nowadays might have some ‘shaky cam’ to add realism and some big explosions but you want to action that shocks you, that gets your heart pounding, that isn’t the formulaic A-team esque ‘explosion to the left, explosion to the right’. You want something that makes you feel like how you felt after the beach scene in Saving Private Ryan. All action films are setting you up for the good guy prevailing over the bad guy but this takes it to the next level.
Whether I’m an imbalanced, psychotic troubled man I don’t know but I do know that I felt physically charged after this film. Not charged to go and hurt someone but feeling that my adrenaline was flowing. I felt alive. A piece of film, like Ong Bak etc, had got a physical reaction from me.
It’s set a new benchmark for conveying the real brutality of war and it will be interesting to see what action films have to do to ‘fire up’ their audience in the future. Either way I certainly think Sly has given it a welcome shot in the arm.
